Page 16 of So Twisted

She frowned. She was just so angry! Of course, he would take thefuckingfreeway.

She walked toward the bus stop on the cross street. She would go home tonight, but tomorrow, instead of taking the bus, she would take a rideshare. She would wait for the truck to exit and then get off the freeway three exits ahead and pretend she was taking the rideshare to a bar or something. Then she would wait at the bus stop wherever Monroe exited.

God, this was going to suck. Patience wasn’t Lillian’s strong suit.

But the reward would be worth it. If she was willing to wait, she would have the chance to show Bold that she wasn't some run-of-the-mill attention-seeking dipshit. She was a force to be reckoned with.

And then Faith Bold would try to reckon with her. And when she did, Lillian Martin would break her. Then she would take the proof of Faith’s end to West, and finally, the man she loved would see her and know he had found his soulmate.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“What’s your take on Lisa?” Michael asked as the two of them drove away from the sanctuary.

“Her emotions seem genuine to me,” Faith replied.

“So you don’t think she’s a suspect?”

Faith shook her head. “No. She had opportunity, and I suppose she could have motive considering Marcus’s past, but she was truly upset by the murder. Not just the fact that Reeves was murdered, but the way he was murdered.”

Michael nodded. “Yeah, I got that impression too. It offended her that someone tried to frame the jaguar.”

“Exactly. If she was going to kill him, that’s not how she would have done it.

“Right.”

“Okay, so what about the animal rights activist angle?”

“I like that,” Faith said. “I think we should follow up on that. Lisa’s right. Militant activists tend to have a warped sense of justice. It wouldn’t be beyond them to think that killing people with tools made to resemble animal attacks would be a sort of poetic revenge.”

“I agree. Call Cuthbert. While you’re at it, see if he found anything on Chen.”

Faith dialed the number and glanced at Turk. He was sniffing the air and shaking his head, an odd expression on his face. Her smile faded. He looked confused again. What was going on?

He noticed her and gave her the toothy grin that she had fallen in love with nearly three years ago. Then he tilted his head and sniffed some more. Finally, he barked exuberantly and buried his nose in Michael’s jacket pocket. A moment later, he surfaced with his snout buried in a bag of beef jerky.

Faith sighed with relief. He wasn’t confused. He just smelled food.

“Hello? Bold, are you there?”

“Yes! Yes, sorry. Um… Did you learn anything from Chen’s friends and family?”

“Well, sort of. Nothing helpful. She had no friends, and her family didn’t talk to her.”

“Bad blood?”

“Not that they knew of. She just stopped talking to people. Probably didn’t want them to know that she had a weird hoarding obsession with animals.”

“I can understand that. Well, we have another angle for you to look into.”

“Good, because I’m at square zero, and I hate square zero.”

“Me too. Lisa Hartley at the animal sanctuary shared some interesting news with us.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. It turns out that Marcus Reeves used to run a zoo that was shut down for severe animal husbandry violations.”

“That so? So we think this is a white knight avenging the deaths of animals.”

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